Case Number 06808

Big Meat Eater

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All Rise...

Judge Paul Corupe's review has been sponsored by the Canadian Fast Food Council, which reminds you that meat is part of any balanced diet.

The Charge

"Pleased to Meet You, Meat to Please You"

Opening Statement

Before every wannabe filmmaker had unfettered access to the combined
filmographies of Edward D. Wood Jr. and William Castle, B-movie parodies were
more than just a collection of knowing references for genre geeks. Films like
John Landis's Schlock and The
Rocky Horror Picture Show made an impact on audiences by mixing the
ingredients of grade-Z filmmaking into an intoxicating cocktail that was often
even stranger than their inspirations. Released in 1982, the tragically obscure
Big Meat Eater is another agreeable pastiche of pulp trash, an unusual
musical/sci-fi/horror/comedy about aliens, Turkish butchers, and radioactive
deli meat. Both a tribute and a takeoff on B-film and blind optimism in science,
this consciously cult Canadian classic follows a cast of eccentric characters as
they look forward to the mysterious future from the quaint small town of
Burquitlam, British Columbia somewhere in the 1950s.

Facts of the Case

After being fired from his job as town hall boiler-minder by corrupt Mayor
Rigatoni (Howard Taylor, Boom), Turkish behemoth Abdullah (Clarence
"Big" Miller, A Name for Evil) murders his boss in cold blood.
Donning his fez and hitting the streets, Abdullah soon finds himself in the
employ of town butcher and eternal optimist Bob Sanderson (George Dawson, The
Grey Fox). Unbeknownst to Bob, however, Abdullah is more interested in using
the meat cooler as a hiding place for the Mayor's body than he is in slicing up
orders of cold cuts.

Meanwhile, just above the earth, a pair of aliens (convincingly portrayed by
wind-up toys) discover that the butcher shop is a rich source of
"Balonium," a radioactive fuel created when Bob's meat scraps fuse
with the chemicals in his septic tank. In order to harvest the Balonium, the
space invaders bring the Mayor back to life, who in turn hires construction
contractor Joe Wyzinski (Stephen Dimopoulos, Happy Gilmore) to build a large
pavilion of the future called "Vision of Tomorrowland." Of course,
Tomorrowland is really a landing pad for the aliens, and it's to be built right
on the site of the butcher shop, which Bob learns must be torn down immediately.
But before the job can begin, Joe's nerdy son Jan (Andrew Gillies, The Virgin
Suicides) also identifies the Balonium as a potential fuel source for his
own homemade space rocket, and makes plans to get to it first.

The Evidence

Almost a decade before Big Meat Eater played its first darkened
theatre, likeminded university students Laurence Keane, Chris Windsor, and Mike
Chechik were collaborating on a variety of short film projects. Sharing a love
of the comic, the trio made a 1950s beach party/horror spoof called Campus
Carnage, as well as Roofman, a tongue-in-cheek reaction to
Vancouver's soaring rent rates, and It Takes Two, a venereal disease film
contracted by the BC government that they somehow managed to turn into a comedy.
After graduating, the budding filmmakers came up with an idea for a feature film
called The Butcher of Burquitlam.

Burquitlam, as it is colloquially known, refers to a small area between the
Vancouver suburbs of Burnaby and Coquitlam. "I was fascinated by this
little community," explains Laurence Keane. "It consisted of basically
a strip mall with a centerpiece store—a butcher's shop. It kind of summed
up the feelings we had about Vancouver and Canada at this time: Burquitlam was a
charming, insulated island stuck in the 1950s." At the end of the 1970s,
Keane, Windsor, and Chechik finally developed the Butcher into a script,
a satire on earnest Canadian films of the period. "The idea evolved into a
film about multiculturalism, small town attitudes, a Canadian butcher, his
murdering Turkish apprentice, aliens, and allegiance to the Queen-all set to
music," he says. With Keane producing and Windsor directing, the
film—renamed Big Meat Eater—finally went in front of cameras
in 1980, and the result was one of Canada's strangest film endeavors.

It's easy for a modern audience to see how Windsor and Keane might have been
riffing on established cult classics The Rocky Horror Picture Show with its
campy musical aspirations, and Plan 9 from
Outer Space, with a "grave robbers from outer space" plot, but
Big Meat Eater is less interested in handing out perfunctory nods to
B-classics than it is concerned with manipulating familiar conventions to create
something on its own. Threading a clever and humorous meat motif throughout the
film, Big Meat Eater ties together three wildly different tales about
alien invaders resurrecting the dead, a murdering apprentice butcher, and a
do-it-yourself teenage astronaut hopeful. The film's schizophrenic script
tackles the unrestrained self-assurance of the 1950s, making impossible leaps
from community talent shows to the birth of universal languages to fortune
tellers in an anarchic pattern known only to the screenwriters. The sets may be
threadbare and the special effects hokey, but unlike an Ed Wood film, the ideas,
satire, and bewildering pace of the story on screen prove enough to distract the
viewer from any budgetary shortcomings.

But Big Meat Eater is more than just a top notch 1950s B-movie spoof;
it also holds a place as one of the first English-Canadian films to turn a
gently mocking eye back towards the Great White North. With a bevy of nostalgic
Canadian references, including a decades-old radio broadcast of Maurice
"Rocket" Richard's 500th goal, the film lampoons the attitudes and
prejudices of the people of Burquitlam, who have put their faith in a future of
kitchen appliances rather than the people of their community. The film plays
with Canadian concepts of multiculturalism, portraying the Italian Mayor as a
mob boss, Abdullah as a "bloodthirsty Turk," and the Wyzinski clan as
walking Eastern European stereotypes who snack on whole cloves of
garlic—all except for Jan, who has completely assimilated to Burquitlam
society and adopted a heavy British accent. Like the portrait of the Queen on
the Mayor's wall and the townspeople's determination to erect monuments to a
naïve vision of the future, Big Meat Eater politely skewers a
Canadian mindset that is forever looking ahead while relying on the antiquated
values of the past. This is nicely underscored by the film's musical score,
which serves up big band style show tunes beside progressive new wave tracks by
Vancouver underground heroes UJ3RK5, a group that at one point featured
cyberpunk scribe William Gibson.

Considering the nature of the film, the performances are surprisingly better
than they should be, and the film works because the frenzied satire is played
completely straight by the actors involved. George Dawson is especially great as
happy-go-lucky butcher Bob Sanderson and he's nicely contrasted by Andrew
Gillies's troubled teenage science whiz Jan. Living up to his nickname, the 300+
pound "Big" Miller also proves a formidable presence in the film,
despite no discernable trace of acting talent. A trombonist and singer, Miller
performed with the Duke Ellington Orchestra in the 1950s before settling in
Alberta and becoming a mainstay on the Canadian jazz scene before his death in
1992. In a role that is quite reminiscent of Tor Johnson's turn as the monstrous
Lobo in Bride of the Monster, Miller plods through the town, mumbling and
glowering at Bob's increasingly alarmed customers.

Although clearly overdubbed, the song and dance numbers rank among the
film's many highlights. Miller is virtually mute in the film's straight dialogue
sequences, but he frequently takes the opportunity to break into jazzy, up tempo
songs like "The Baghdad Boogie" and the movie's theme song, "Big
Meat Eater," in which Abdullah proclaims his hatred for fruits and veggies
while using his bare hands to tear through whole chickens and steaks. Others get
to stretch their vocal chords too—the Mayor celebrates his reanimation by
belting out a heart touching ballad, and, in my favorite scene from the film,
Jan and Bob deliver a manic, Devo-esque song about the importance of chemicals
to modern life while dancing spastically with circuit boards.

Big Meat Eater was originally picked up for theatrical distribution
by New Line, who financed a new ending before sending it briefly to theatres.
Most fans of the film, however, discovered the film after it was released on VHS
by Media in the mid-1980s. Koch Vision's new DVD upgrade isn't a giant step
beyond the old video copy, but that's mostly due to the budget and source
problems of the original film. The print is still pretty grainy, and the
soundtrack is still inaudible in certain passages—mostly Abdullah's
grunted lines, but considering the humble origins of the film, this is probably
about as good as the film is ever going to look. As for extras, all we get is a
lone photo gallery.

Closing Statement

Maybe it's the toe-tapping songs, maybe it's the subversive satire, or maybe
it's just the frenzied kitchen sink approach to filmmaking, but Big Meat
Eater works far better than it should; an indescribably goofy treat that
rebuilds the 1950s clichés from the ground up and twists them just enough
to set itself apart from the run-of-the-mill creature feature parodies. Perhaps
the finest cult film to ever come from the chillier side of the 49th parallel,
Big Meat Eater is a pioneering grade-Z spoof that pulses with an
infectious energy that trumps its obvious micro-budget.